Dead Man’s Footsteps

At that moment, Abby’s phone started ringing. She looked down at the display and saw it was her mother’s new number. She looked back at Doris.

‘It’s OK, thanks.’

Doris raised a finger. ‘There’s something burning on the stove, dear. Pop back up if you need me.’

Abby took the call as Doris closed the door.

It was her mother’s voice. But it was all trembling and wrong, and breathless, as if she was reading from a script.

‘Abby,’ she said. ‘Ricky wants to speak to you. I’m going to put him on. Please do exactly what he tells you.’

Then the line went dead.

Abby frantically redialled. It went straight to voicemail. Then almost instantly she had another incoming call. The display read: Private number calling.

It was Ricky.

88

OCTOBER 2007

‘Where’s my mother?’ Abby yelled into the phone before Ricky had a chance to speak. ‘Where is she, you bastard? WHERE IS SHE?’

A door behind her opened and an elderly man peered out, then closed it again loudly.

Distraught now, in retrospect, that she had been so stupid as to leave her mother with this old woman, Abby hurried to the relative privacy of the stairwell.

‘I want to speak to her now. Where is she?’

‘Your mother is fine, Abby,’ he said. ‘She’s as snug as a bug in a rug – in case you were wondering where it had gone.’

With the phone clamped to her ears, she tripped back downstairs and into her mother’s flat, closing the door behind her. She walked through into the sitting room, staring at the bare boards showing through the underlay again. Tears were streaming down her face. She was shaking, starting to feel disassociated, the first signs of a panic attack coming on.

‘I’m calling the police, Ricky,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about anything else any more. OK? I’m going to call the police right now.’

‘I don’t think so, Abby,’ he said calmly. ‘I think you are too smart to do that. What are you going to say to them? I stole everything this man had and now he’s caught up with me and he’s taken my mother as hostage. You have to be able to account for things, Abby. In the western world today, with all the money-laundering regulations, you have to be able to account for substantial possessions and amounts of money. How are you going to account for what you’ve got, on the earnings of a Melbourne bar waitress?’

She screamed back down the phone, ‘I don’t care any more, Ricky. OK?’

There was a brief silence. Then he said, ‘Oh, I think you do. You didn’t do what you did to me on a sudden impulse. You planned this long and hard, you and Dave, didn’t you? Any position he didn’t tell you to shag me in, or was it just me who got fucked?’

‘This has nothing to do with my mother. Bring her back. Bring her here and we’ll talk.’

‘No, you bring me everything you’ve taken and then we’ll talk.’

The panic attack was worsening. She was taking deep gulps of air. Her head was burning. She felt as if she was half floating out of her body, that her body was going to die on her. She tripped sideways, hit the end of the sofa, clung desperately to one of the arms, then swung herself down on to it and sat there giddily.

‘I’m hanging up now,’ she gasped, ‘and I’m calling the police.’

But even as she said the words she could feel that some of the conviction had gone from her voice, and that he could feel it too.

‘Yeah, and then what?’

‘I don’t care. I don’t bloody care!’ Like a child having a tantrum, she repeated several times, louder each time, ‘I don’t bloody care!’

‘You should. Because they’re going to find a chronically ill woman who has committed suicide, and her daughter a thief, with a cock-and-bull story about the man she stole from, and the man who put her up for it isn’t exactly in a position to enter any witness box to back her up. So think your way out of that one, smart bitch. I’m going to leave you to calm down now and I’m going to brew your mum a nice cup of tea, and then I’ll call you back.’

‘No – wait-’ she shouted.

But he had hung up.

Then, suddenly, she remembered the taxi waiting outside, with the meter running.

89

OCTOBER 2007

Roy Grace sent Cleo a brief text telling her he had arrived as he stood waiting for the baggage carousel to start up. By his calculation, it would be 6.15 p.m. in the UK. Fifteen minutes before the start of the evening briefing meeting on Operation Dingo.

He called DI Lizzie Mantle to get an update, but both her direct landline and mobile numbers went to voicemail. Next he tried Glenn Branson, who answered on the second ring.

‘Got your shoes back on?’

‘Yeah, I phoned to tell you that. Thought you might be pleased.’

‘So where are you? You’ve arrived, right? JFK Airport?’

‘Newark. Just waiting for my bag.’

‘All right for some, swanning off to New York, leaving us all here at the coal face.’

‘I would have sent you to Australia, but I didn’t think in your current situation that would have been too clever.’

‘At this moment, the further away I am from Ari, the happier she is. Anyhow, more on that when you get back.’

Spare me, Grace thought. And whilst he would do anything to help this man he loved so much, he was always nervous about giving him – or indeed anyone else – advice on matters that could affect their lives. What the hell did he know? And what kind of an example had his own marriage been? But he said none of this now.

‘So, tell me, what updates?’ he said.

‘Well, we’ve actually been hard at work while you’ve been lounging back, swigging champagne and watching movies for the past seven hours.’

‘I’ve been in cattle class, fighting off cramp, listeria and deep-vein thrombosis. And my headset didn’t work. Other than that, you’re pretty close.’

‘It’s tough at the top, Roy. Isn’t that what they say?’

‘Yeah, yeah. This is costing a fortune. Cut the chat!’

Branson reported on their visits to the stamp dealer Hawkes and Hugo Hegarty.

Grace listened intently. ‘So it really is stamps! She converted the whole lot into stamps!’

‘That’s right. Portability. All the money-laundering regulations. They have sniffer dogs at airports that are trained to smell cash. And three and a quarter million in cash takes up a lot of space. But that value in stamps would take up just a couple of A4 envelopes.’

‘Do we have any idea what she did with them?’

‘No. Not so far. Anyhow, then we went to see Lorraine Wilson’s sister.’

‘What did she have to say?’

‘Quite a lot, actually.’

There was a beep and the carousel started moving. Grace was jostled by two hugely fat men, then an old woman backed a luggage cart into his legs. He stepped back and away from the crowd swarming around the conveyor, to a place where he had some space but could still see the bags. He knew from a stint at Gatwick Airport some years ago that theft of luggage from conveyor belts was common.

‘There’s a lot of noise your end,’ Branson said.

‘I can hear you OK. Tell me?’

‘First thing is, the sister went to New York with Lorraine Wilson a week after 9/11 – just as soon as they could get a flight. They went to the hotel Ronnie was staying at, the W.’

‘The W?’ Grace queried. ‘The W what?’

‘That’s its name.’

‘Just W?’

‘Old-timer, you spend your life under a stone or what? You need to employ me as your full-time style guru. The W is a chain. They’re, like, considered u?ber-cool hotels.’

‘Yeah, well, my salary doesn’t run to u?ber-cool hotels.’

‘I can’t believe you haven’t heard of them.’

‘Well, there you go, yet another of life’s many unsolved mysteries. Anything you want to tell me about it, other than that I haven’t heard of it?’

‘Yeah, quite a bit. So, some of his belongings were still in the room, and the management weren’t too happy, because the credit card he’d given had maxed out on them.’

‘They didn’t make any allowance for the fact that he was dead?’

‘I presume they didn’t know at that point. He’d booked in for just two nights and left an opened credit card slip with them. Anyhow, the thing is that his passport and airline ticket back to the UK were still in the safe.’

To his relief, Grace suddenly saw his bag appear. ‘Hang on a tick.’ He hurried forward to grab it, then said, ‘OK, go on.’

‘So then they went to Pier 92, where the NYPD had set up a kind of bereavement centre. People were bringing stuff like hairbrushes, so they could get the DNA of probable victims to help identify the bodies, or the body parts. They were also displaying personal items that had been recovered. Lorraine went there with her sister, but the police hadn’t recovered anything belonging to her husband that could identify him, at that stage.’

Grace lugged his bag away from the crowd to a quieter spot, then had to wait for a tannoy announcement to end before he could ask, ‘What about the money Lorraine received?’

‘I’ll come to that – and I gotta dash in a minute to the briefing.’